Dealing with the Bomb, and an Unstable Post-War World

[After observing the friendliness of Japanese prisoners of war and noting that “practically all the people in this world like to be nice and get along with each other,” my father makes his first journal entry about the arrival of atomic bombs on the world scene. He isn’t too optimistic about the prospects for the U.S., or the world at large, to do a good job of managing this new destructive power. Nor does he expect a victorious U.S. to seriously address the inequities among nations in the post-war period, despite the emergence of a modern world that “is too small to exist as a group of jealous and sovereign states.”]

December 6, 1945 (Okinawa, Japan)

… All along the roads here on Okinawa, as we go rumbling along on our truck, we pass Okinawan men, women and kids, trudging along singly or in groups, most of them carrying bundles of junk they’ve picked up from the dumps. It just takes a wave of the hand and a smile to get a wave and a smile in return. Some of them even make the first gesture.

Up at the dump where we took our load of scrap field wire there were some Jap PWs unloading trucks, little wiry fellows, very inoffensive-looking, who work rapidly and efficiently. On the way back we passed a truck with a couple of PW’s in the back. As we drew alongside, one of them saluted me smartly and grinned. “You know, Siggie,” I said, “practically all of the people in this world like to be nice and get along with each other.”

“Sure, that’s right,” Siggie said. “They all like to be liked.”

Not all of them, of course. A lot of people are like those Canadians I was just reading about in TIME who want to get all the Jap “rats” out of Canada, even though they may have been born there. For one reason or another, people are taught to hate certain groups of other people who happen to differ from them in color, religion, race, occupation, or social standing. But who promotes these hatreds, and why? Well, it looks like one group pitting itself against another; until a whole mythology of grievances and prejudices is built up to justify the often inhumane measures which each group practices to protect its own special interests, and finally there evolves a false morality based almost solely on power. And though this development is nothing new in human society, the new technology which produces the modern implements of power has brought us to the critical points where the largest groups, or nations, are capable of annihilating each other.

Critical people generally, and TIME magazine notably, in my limited reading of recent weeks, have been pointing up the revolutionary terror which the atomic bomb has let loose in the world. They also take the average people to task for failing to wake up and do something about it. Do what? Keep it an American secret? We sense that would be fine, if it were possible, but the troublesome fact arises that the secret is really no secret at all. Russia, we are told, will be able to produce atomic bombs in two to five years.

Well, then, how about releasing everything we know to an international commission, and leave it to the commission to control atomic research for the good of the world? To some people that makes a good deal of sense, and probably a good many people who don’t believe such beneficent control possible wish that it were. And still other people see the bomb simply as the culmination of man’s age-old, ironic lust for power, – ironic in the sense that he has been feverishly searching for the instrument which will assure his own destruction. And now he’s found it. So what the hell?

I confess that at the present time I’m pretty much of a mind with this third group. And though I recognize that such an attitude must be considered cynical by people who don’t share it, I don’t consider myself cynical for holding it. I like people, and I don’t normally enjoy seeing them get hurt. I can’t derive any satisfaction from seeing the German and Japanese people suffering the starvation and misery now which they so recently imposed upon other peoples. There was a time when I believed that somehow the common suffering of this war would lead men of all nations to put into practice what is almost universally admitted in theory, – that the modern world is too small to exist as a group of jealous and sovereign states. It may be too early to be disillusioned, but then, too, it may have been too late to hope.

My aunt Eva has for several years been trying to sell me on the Bahai group, which is but one of many groups propagating the old Christian faith in the brotherhood of man and its practical realization on earth. With the faith I am in complete accord, but of its realization I remain unconvinced. Human organization, which is always as much against something as it is for something, inevitably seems to corrupt no matter how noble its original purpose. The only true brotherhood of man occurs in the earliest years of infancy. As soon as I begin to talk and understand, I’m an American, and Hans is a German. “My country, right or wrong” expresses an attitude which honest and just people may often deplore, but which only the rarest of martyrs can ever deny. Even when one’s country is flagrantly wrong, treason remains a crime universally abhorred. But millions of men can be made to look upon murder as a virtue when the victim is an enemy of one’s country. The appeal to patriotism almost always drowns out the voice of conscience. Many Americans can feel perfectly righteous about insisting on raising their own already comfortable standard of living while millions of Europeans and Asiatics are facing a winter of freezing and starvation. Yet they would be unspeakably indignant and bitter if the scales were suddenly shifted to the opposite extreme. They can’t see how they are doing any wrong now, but if they had to change places, they would certainly feel that they were being wronged.

The funny thing is that though I understand all this, I don’t intend to do much of anything about it. I, too, look forward to enjoying the comforts of American life, even though I can’t partake of whatever further pleasure there may be in the feeling of self-righteousness.

The old cry of “Let’s set our own house in order first” will soon regain sufficient strength to kill our present feeble and fumbling attempts to set in order a world house in which our own country is but one of the rooms. We’ll go ahead with a lavish job of redecorating our own room, and then won’t we be surprised when it’s ruined by the rest of the house falling in on it!

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“National Sovereignty” Concept Cripples U.N.’s Mandate

 [In this third installment drawn from the July 22, 1945 entry, my father presciently identifies the problems the new United Nations organization will face, especially due to its adoption of the slippery concept of “national sovereignty.” In many ways, this entry foreshadows the rocky road that the UN has travelled since its founding, particularly the Cold War-era face-offs between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Whether it’s from China, Libya or the U.S. itself, the constant invocation of National Sovereignty by U.N. member countries shows no signs of dissipating.]

 July 22, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.), con’t.

…We may already have congratulated ourselves on the part we played in the drafting of the United Nations Charter at San Francisco, and on the part we now expect to play in whatever international organization is established under the charter. But our congratulations should be well-tempered with caution. The document on which we are preparing to set our Congressional stamp of approval is well booby-trapped with those supposedly rational words and phrases which technological developments have made largely obsolete in the modern world. We may bandy them about in good faith, but when we shape national policy on them, we’d better be damned sure we know what we’re talking about before we act.

“National sovereignty” was a phrase stressed more, perhaps, than any other at the Conference, and it’s by all odds the most dangerous. For what does “national sovereignty” mean in today’s world? The most common interpretation seems to be that the administration of domestic affairs is solely the concern of the respective national governments. This, at least, is the best that the delegates to San Francisco would allow themselves publically to express, though if they are the able men they’re supposed to be, they must all privately have realized that this interpretation is little more than a verbal evasion for the time being of a practical problem which must be faced repeatedly whenever the international organization begins to function. For it is simply a backhanded statement of isolationism (You let me alone, and I’ll let you alone), and  thus at the very beginning a flat admission that the nations are not willing to attempt to enforce that international law and order which could be their only justification for joining together in the first place.

Of course this is an overstatement of the situation. But it’s better to see it that way than to attempt to hide it or minimize it. Its most optimistic supporters admit that the charter is only a hopeful beginning. At least it gets most of the nations on the world peacefully together under one roof. What goes on after that admittedly depends on the willingness of the great powers, or the US and the USSR, to cooperate. But it isn’t clearly pointed out that international cooperation must inevitably mean a continuing compromise on matters which are still considered to be purely domestic in nature. Until “national sovereignty” is whittled down to about the present significance of “state sovereignty” in the US, no international organization will have a ghost of a chance of keeping the world at peace.

This is going to [be] a tough job of whittling, when most of it must be done by two nations of such divergent political opinion and practice as America and Russia. We want the Russians to come a certain distance towards democratic capitalism. We must then be prepared to move a certain distance towards democratic communism. I say this without meaning that Russian communism is at present markedly democratic. We believe that much is lacking in that respect, though we must concede that millions of Russians are apparently well-satisfied with their government, and convinced that we Americans are politically backward in certain respects. This is certainly not a situation which can be helped by name-calling. But we should insist on steadily expanding facilities for the interchange of unbiased news, as well as facts and figures on industrial production and military strength. Among nations which honestly desire to remain at peace with each other there can be no reason for suppressing such information, and its dissemination in reliable, public bulletins should have the effect of dissipating that unhealthful atmosphere of intrigue and distrust with which nations have habitually carried on their diplomatic relations. Texas doesn’t feel injured when Massachusetts knows how much oil it produces, or how many airplanes. The members of an international organization which means business should invite the publication of all such devious facts.

The possibilities of such forms of international cooperation are as numerous as the problems which the nations of the world share in common. But we will never see them realized if we place our hopes in the formal signing of documents and treaties, and the dispensation of high-minded advice. Ours is the potential power, and therefore the responsibility, to set practical examples of cooperation for the maintenance of international law and order. There’ll be no law and order in those places where people have no food and shelter and clothing. In those places it’s our responsibility to provide the essentials of life as far as our means allow without the actual deprivation of any of our own citizens of these essentials. Our business sense should tell us, if it’s as keen as we claim, that we won’t get something valuable without paying a good price for it. International order and peace in a world so terribly devastated by war comes at a high price. Millions of American men are still paying that price in the actual  waging of war. But most Americans have a chance to get off incomparably easy as compared with the peoples of the rest of the world. Near the all time material peak of their standard of living, in spite of the war, they have only consent to the slight cut in that standard which will be necessary to supply the peoples of devastated areas with the means of staying alive and starting a new community life from scratch.

Put didactically, as I have done it, this sounds like an easy thing to do. But put practically to Sam Jones and family, in the form of continued rationing so that our ships can cart off to foreign countries some of the things “we’ve been fighting for,” it will be near to a political impossibility. In the abstract, perhaps, it won’t be so hard to convince Sam that primarily we’re fighting for a peaceful world where all men will be able to enjoy a larger share of the things which make life more pleasant, – the beef steaks and the automobiles. But then tell him that he’ll have to wait a little longer than he expected for his own postwar beefsteak and automobile, and he’ll write to his senator: “Dear Bill: How much longer is this country of our going to play Santa Claus to those damned foreigners? Cut out sending them good stuff that American citizens can use right her and now!”

Already this outcry is rising like an Anvil Chorus throughout the nation’s newspapers. And no doubt it’s rising to a roar in Congressional mail. That’s public opinion. The poor Congressmen have little choice. Cut down UNRRA shipments. Stop feeding civilian populations in liberated and conquered countries. Relax rationing at home. No foreign loans without guaranteed security….

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The Limits of Letting Public Opinion Drive Public Policy

 [In a long journal entry — close to 4,000 words — on July 22, 1945, my father opined about foreign policy, the imperative of the United States to engage in reconstruction, the downside of public opinion driving public policy, and a host of other topics. In this first excerpt from that entry, he notes the proclivity of the “everyman” American, Sam Jones, to worry more about a steak dinner today than a recurrence of world war 15 or 20 years into the future. My father’s comments about the need for political leaders willing to buck the pressure of uninformed public opinion seem apropos to the present day (as his journal writings often do). Another of his statements that remains true for our times: “…we easily persuaded ourselves that national good was necessarily universal good, and failed to perceive that certain of our cherished advantages were maintained directly or indirectly at the expense of other parts of the world.”]

July 22, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

… Basically, these war years, with their extravagant spending of men and material, have outraged the practical “business sense” of the common American who carries on the national business, be he civilian or soldier. Right now, he’s getting angry about our large scale handouts to our Allies, and President Truman, his perfect representative, is apparently telling the boys at Potsdam that from now on it’s “put up or shut up.” This attitude is generally applauded, and rightly so, if we don’t let ourselves get talked or scared into “practical” deals which end by increasing, rather than diminishing, the various frictions still existing among the nations. But that’s a big IF, and will often call for national policy which demands present sacrifices as the investment in future security. UNRRA [United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration] presents such a situation now, and we don’t seem willing to go very far beyond a profession of good intentions. Exasperated, but well-fed Americans get the preference over starving Europeans. And later many Americans will become exasperated at these Europeans for embracing Communism after we’d gone to the trouble and expense of liberating them from Fascists totalitarianism. We’ll never know how quickly the sweets of liberation can pale on an empty stomach.

As a nation we’ll make these “mistakes” simply because a steak dinner today seems more important to Sam Jones and his family than another world war fifteen or twenty years from now. That doesn’t mean that Sam Jones is a bad or irresponsible man, but it would seem to mean that he’s a poor man to entrust with the shaping of American foreign policy. Yet Sam Jones, taken by the million, is public opinion, and we are told with authoritative finality that American foreign policy between these last two wars was increasingly isolationist and appeasing because public opinion would allow nothing else. “We knew what was coming,” many of our leading statesmen have said, “but we were powerless to act because of public opinion.” Of course, one seriously questions the omniscience of most of these bleating sheep, but at the same time one must admit a measure of truth in their argument. If important information was made available to the members of Congress, information which revealed the extreme danger of our position in an Axis dominated world, and if these men, reflecting the naturally limited viewpoint of their constituents, refused to believe in the significance of this information, refused, possibly for reasons of election strategy, to pass it on to their constituents, and thus left us dismally unprepared when the strike came, then our foreign policy set-up is certainly inadequate.

There is always pressure for various changes in any governmental system, and unimportant changes in both personnel and procedure are constantly being made. Over a period of years these minor changes may add up to a real change in political philosophy. This is evolutionary development, and has been a privilege of the American people since 1789, with the exception of the Civil War. At that time the revolutionary concept of the right of secession from the Union was advanced, and it was denied only at the cost of a bloody war.

The present war has been as much a Civil War as that war between the North and the South, but because it concerns a world union of “sovereign” nations rather than a continental union of “sovereign“ states, because the apparent national differences of the peoples involved have obscured the basic philosophical issue, we, as the victor side, are likely to bungle the victor’s responsibility of directing reconstruction even worse than we did after our Civil War, when the issues were relatively clearer. The German and Japanese totalitarian governments have been a mortal challenge to our own democratic institutions. This challenge could hardly have been made with such ferocity if democratic government had seemed as fair and advantageous to the rest of the world as it seemed to us. In other words, we easily persuaded ourselves that national good was necessarily universal good, and failed to perceive that certain of our cherished advantages were maintained directly or indirectly at the expense of other parts of the world. And to bring it closer home, we may as well admit that during the thirties the democratic way of life left several million Americans out in the cold of economic privation. Had these millions become a majority, or seized political power while still a minority, Americans might possibly have found themselves attempting the desperate cure for their ills which the Germans tried under Hitler….

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Idealism As a Defining American Characteristic

[At this writing, my father had moved to a new Army camp in Texas, Camp Fannin. He comments on the idealism that underlies of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and a number of famous political speeches and documents. My father also notes his own shift from cynicism to embrace of the idealism expressed, which he considers a defining characteristic of the country and its citizens. It’s fair to say that cynicism largely has won the battle over idealism in the U.S. in recent decades, with one of the rare exceptions, perhaps, being the collective idealism inspired by the Obama Presidential campaign. Post election, it didn’t take long for our dysfunctional federal government and its crop of self-serving elected officials — combined, of course, with the hope-crushing recession — to snuff out most of that idealistic sentiment. So is an America without idealism, in all its impracticality, still America?]

September 25, 1943 (Camp Fannin, Tex.)

This week I’ve been reading a Pocket Book Anthology of American literature, which includes the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Washington’s Farwell Address, a part of Jefferson’s first inaugural speech, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, Wilson’s War Message to Congress, FDR’s speech on the Four Freedoms, and Wallace’s “Price of Free World Victory.”

In every one of these papers, which have played such tremendous roles in American history, there run the same words of high idealism, of devotion to the concept of human freedom under law, of deep respect for the Christian morality. Two years ago I was in a mood to sniff out of these words all kinds of shameless hypocrisy. Today I am proud of these words, and proud to be a member of the nation that has attempted to live up to their high challenge. The very fact that the mark is held so high guarantees many failures in our attempts to reach it, and the consequent ridicule or curses of those who choose to consider our experiment cynically. But now I know that I myself would far rather lay myself open to this ridicule and cursing than to play the “safe” game of flattering power, wherever it exists, for the simple reason that it is power. That may be a good way to keep the flesh stirring, but it’s a sure way to kill the creative spirit.

It’s not all dismaying to come to the realization that most Americans usually disavow the idealism that is the core of American greatness. They do this for many reasons, but largely because for most of their lives they are practical businessmen, and idealism is impractical. On a certain plane of reasoning they are perfectly right. It’s on this plane that a national policy of isolationism works out to be practical. I’m going to offer the thesis that on this plane they are not distinctively Americans, for I believe that the distinctive thing about America is its idealism. The bright fact about the American people is that, however much they belittle idealism in their personal lives, they are proud of it in their national life, and continue to put the reins of government in the hands of idealists.

Every nation has had men of the moral stature of Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, Jackson (I believe), Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR (I hope), but no other nation has so consistently made them its political leaders. And this, I believe, is the sole justification needed for the democratic forms of government. It overwhelms all those criticisms which can possibly be raised against it.

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Max Lerner Lectures on the War

[Although this journal entry consists primarily of my father’s summary of a lecture by Max Lerner, I decided to include it as it demonstrates my father’s skill as a reporter — a skill that eventually led him to Columbia Journalism School and, then, to the Providence Journal in Rhode Island. Max Lerner was a writer and educator, who would go on, in 1949, to launch an influential column in the New York Post. As reported by my father, Lerner’s talk ranged from his growing optimism about the U.S.’s impact on the course of the war to his criticism that Jim Crow laws were negatively affecting America’s war efforts.]

December 2, 1942 (Middlebury College)

Max Lerner spoke here last night. In his introduction, Bob Rafuse spoke of him as one of the fighters in the front line of the battle of ideas. Lerner lived up to his characterization. I was not so much impressed with what he said as the way he said it. He spoke very clearly, in a pleasant voice, and knew just where he was every minute. He didn’t beat around the bush, but shot his ideas straight from the shoulder, so that there could be no doubt that he knew what he was talking about, and believed in it. “Name-calling can be a very good thing,” he said, “as long as you call the right people the right names.”

He began by saying that he felt better since the opening of [the] North African campaign than at anytime in the last decade. “Up until now we were worried as to whether the US would be able to gather itself for action in time. It is very late now, but it is in time. At long last I can see through the long dark tunnel to the clear air and sunshine ahead. We know now that we can win the war. But the tragic possibility is that we may not know what to do with the clear air and sunshine.”

“American business has handled production better than we had any reason to expect. But still there are too many men in high positions who are more interested in the plants with which they are connected than with the total war effort. Labor has still not been given the representation in the WPB [War Production Board] that it deserves, and that Donald Nelson [chairman of the WPB] promised to it some time ago.

“We are not making any apparent progress on our Negro problem. Industry refuses to hire black men. Baltimore imported 10,000 white laborers when there were that many negroes idle in the city. Jim Crow laws are still maintained in the Army. Henry Kaiser [whose Kaiser Shipyard built Liberty ships during the war] is a really great American businessman, but he is counteracted by too many men like the West Coast union leader who won’t admit negroes into his union.

“There are far too many of the men still in power who only a year ago were shouting that we could do business with Hitler, that we couldn’t get into a war against Fascism without becoming Fascist ourselves, that a European war was no concern of ours. Many of these men have just a month ago been returned to Congress, and have taken this as a mandate from the people to go right ahead with their program of opposition to the administration. These men are dangerous. They must be removed from power by intelligent voting on the part of American citizens.

“America has assembled a striking force stronger than Hitler’s, and done it without sacrificing the democratic liberties. A democracy can be strong, in peace as well as in war, and incomparably stronger than Fascism. Archibald MacLeish saw the true nature of our foe when he characterized it in The Fall of the City as an armored giant all empty inside. The sight of it is terrible only until you stand before it and fight.

“The military war is going well. Our real problem is in the diplomatic war and the idea war. This [François] Darlan deal can’t be stomached. It has shaken the faith of the French people in us, and can lose us many more lives in the long run than it may have saved us at present. Our State Department is showing an extremely dangerous tendency towards a Machiavellian diplomacy that puts the European powers to shame. Our victory must be morally sound all the way though, or it’s no victory at all. Apparently [Secretary of State Cordell] Hull, and possibly even FDR, regard the establishment of such Rightist regimes in Western Europe as a desirable counterpoise to the Leftist influence of Russia, which may well emerge from this war as the strongest European power. But such a policy can only lead to a perfect setup for another struggle.

“This, then, is the justification of our cause: To decide whether American democracy, and a world of democratic states, can exist and grow under the highly complicated conditions of our technical machine civilization.”

That was the main gist of his talk. He answered questions for an hour and half. The fine thing here was that he had his answers ready; he didn’t have to dig around for them, or retrench on what he had already said. He did say that Roosevelt has believed that it’s important to get things done without regard for the abstract principle, and that was disturbing. It’s what Emerson said about Napoleon.

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